Jake Monaghan's "Just Policing"

Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at USC School of Philosophy. He earned his PhD at the University at Buffalo. His research interests are in political philosophy and public policy, with a focus on policing and the criminal justice system.

Monaghan applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Just Policing, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Just Policing concludes a section and starts a new one. Here is the start of the new section, applying the “legitimacy-risk” framework I develop in the book to vice policing:

Above, I mentioned that the framework serves an epistemic function. Applying the framework to a case helps to clarify this point. One might reject liberal neutrality and think using political power to enforce their controversial conception of the good life is a legitimate function of the state. Therefore, one might think, (certain) vice laws are legitimate. But, when we think about what goes into vice enforcement, we are also thinking about legitimacy risks. In most cases, the enforcement is weakly authorized. To have any chance at success, it will likely have to be proactive. Police will have to search for those engaging in vicious behavior, either through stings or through filtering strategies. And because it is difficult to tell from looking at someone whether they are engaging in vicious behavior, those filtering strategies are likely to be quite harsh. More contact means more burden. Finally, to successfully deter such behavior, people will be inclined toward punishment. The kind of policing we can expect from vice units looks like exceptionally high legitimacy risk. This should give us serious reservations about the legitimacy of enforcing prohibitions on recreational drug use or sex work, for example. It also gives the police administrator and the police officer reason to focus their efforts elsewhere: there's plenty of low-risk policing to be done. This point applies widely: police should generally focus their scarce resources on low-risk policing, and their discretion should reduce risks to legitimacy.

This conclusion makes progress on the question of police priorities. But what this argument does at a more basic level is highlight that the vice unit in patrol, the narcotics unit in the investigative division, the homicide department, the patrol division, and so on are doing fundamentally different kinds of work.

I was surprised to see how well the Page 99 Test worked. The page gives a brief application of some of the core ideas of the book.

One of my projects is to develop a theory of what justice requires of the police when there are related injustices in society. In the US, for instance, the legislature regularly acts unjustly (e.g., by criminalizing recreational drug use), and our trial and corrections systems often fail to provide fair trials or safe facilities (such that punishment is unjustified or disproportionate). Further, we typically ask more of the police (via the legislature) than they can do; they can’t enforce all the laws all the time. So, how does justice constrain the necessarily fraught and discretionary nature of policing?

The framework is supposed to help answer that question. Police should navigate their option-set by considering how likely a possible police action is to be illegitimate and so unjust. Weak authorization (low electoral support), proactivity (seeking violations out), harshness (high likelihood of mistaken arrests) and high burdens (regarding the costs to subjects of police power) are all features of police activity that interactively increase legitimacy-risk. “I’m just enforcing the law” is a weak justification for exercising police power. The Page 99 Test gives not only a good sense of the book’s project, it gives a concise statement of the main theoretical framework for making progress on it. Of course, these claims all require support. Readers will have to consult the book for arguments!

Visit Jake Monaghan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue